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AMI-Partners: VoIP, VPN, Storage and IP Telephony Are Key in APAC CountriesJul 22, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- AMI-Partners reported that in export markets for Australia, Japan and Korea, falling demand is not changing the fundamentals of SMB (small and medium businesses, or companies with up to 999 employees) spending on networking. The developed APAC SMB networking market is expected to reach US$1.6 billion in 2009, representing a growth of 1.7 percent over 2008, according to new research by AMI-Partners. This will be driven by continued spending on network upgrades and migration to all-IP platforms, coupled with the desire for low latency, no hardware redundancy, operating systems that maximize uptime, and high speed to recovery. AMI believes that networking as a whole will come out of these difficult times with an increased share of overall IT & telecom spending. Adoption of IP voice and video, higher demand for network intelligence, and a growing number of users and devices connected to the network will also drive this spending. "Mobility has taken off over the last couple of years," said Gina Luk, Asia-Pacific Telecommunications and Networking Research Manager at AMI-Partners. "This is occurring as SMB employees in the developed APAC region are traveling more and farther. Korea and Australia SMBs have a greater propensity for telecommuting, while Japan and Australia SMBs tend to be more mobile because of travel. This is evident even among firms across all employee segments." The research also shows that software-based VoIP and conferencing solutions are gaining strong traction, too, as travel budgets are being reduced, and as SMBs download Skype and rent audio and videoconferencing facilities for executive meetings and conferencing. This increases bandwidth consumption, which implies an investment in networking solutions to maintain accessibility. "Internet service providers in Australia, Japan and Korea have launched low-cost VoDSL or VoCable offerings," said Luk, "and we are seeing that the low costs involved would increasingly become appealing for SMBs taking up small VoIP and wireless-enabled VoIP routers. Networking equipment vendors will then need to accelerate emphasis on value-added features to increase their networking business and multiplatform usage growth." Increasingly, SMBs with multiple branches need to transmit data through a secure network; VPN implementation is becoming more common, especially among SMBs in Korea. SMBs are also beefing up security and intrusion detection to fend off ever-increasing electronic threats from growth in email volume and usage of new digital media. To secure data and protect their companies from intrusion, SMBs will be looking to both on-site and managed solutions. Vendors must segment the market in a way that will help SMBs target and capitalize on leads during this downturn. Those that can develop insights on their domestic networking markets along with an understanding of emerging technologies, future scenarios and SMB adoption trends, drivers, attitudes, market penetration, opportunities, channel strategies and marketing optimization are sure to have the highest return-on-marketing-investments (ROMI). AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence -- with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) |